It is only a matter of time before the chicken comes home to roost for the
agents of religious deceit. Those who cocooned themselves in the garb of
evangelism, pretending to win souls when in fact they are winning naira,
dollars and pound sterling for their pockets and families. It is only a
matter of time before their true colours are seen by the discerning. By
their fruits we shall and will know them.
They are ruthless and vicious entrepreneurs masking as men and women of
piety. They are mean, cruel, cold and hungry wolves prowling the nooks and
crannies of our society preying on the weak, the poor, the vulnerable and
the unwary. Pretending to be men and women of God Almighty, their lack of
compassion, odious deceit, greed, exploitation and lack of kindness rival
that of the devil. To discern and decipher any modicum of godliness in
them is a yeoman’s titanic task.
Yes, granted that most Christian and Muslim leaders, yes most, because we
must not paint all with the same brush, are ferocious leeches fleecing the
life out of our people, the Pentecostals represent the worst of these
licentious locusts ravaging our polity. They are selfish, self centered,
obnoxiously acquisitive egomaniacal predators. They take all and
everything but give nothing in return.
I started off at the Anglican Primary School, Òkè -Imobì, Ìwàrà, in Osun
State and finished up at St. Michael Cherubim and Seraphim Primary School,
Òkè-Sênì, in the very heart of Ibadan, Oyo State. My secondary education
was at Cherubim and Seraphim High School, Ilesa. I am more than enormously
proud of these Schools because they laid the foundation of what I have
been able, by God’s grace, to become today.
There were and still are several primary and secondary schools owned by
the Cherubim and Seraphim, Catholics, Methodist, Anglican, Baptist,
Seventh Day Adventist, African Church and many Christian Churches and
organizations.Ditto for many of the Muslim missions. Those Schools were
within reach for and of many. They laid good life foundation for millions
of children who passed through them.
Despite one’s suspicion of Christianity and Islam as foreign faiths with
imperialistic socio – religious and politico – economic motives, these
early missions and their indigenous genre that came later on, all
contributed several positives to the polity. They built not just
affordable schools, they built hospitals all over. They did their best in
giving back to the society in many ways.
Then came the egregiously greedy goons of Pentecostalism. Impelled and
propelled by noxious materialism, they preached dubious prosperity meant
to improve the lives of the anchors and impoverish the “sheep”, obviously
so called because of their docility and vulnerabilities. They ridiculed
and mocked the moderately ascetic living style of the leaders of the
Orthodox Churches.
They glorified shameless flamboyancy with translucent horrifying
hollowness and serendipitous shallowness. They misled and enticed their
unwary victims called “followers” with glittering outwards that are
vacuous at the core. Ostentation was glamourised in the midst of want,
poverty and squalor. They exuded and revelled in reeking arrogance
becoming unfeeling, unperturbed, unconcerned, unloving and uncaring except
where money is concerned.
Their aridity in and of spirituality turned them into baptised agents of
misery and gnashing of teeth for our people. They turned the Bible upside
down as they engage in self serving selective quoting of the Book. The
Pentecostals are the proofs of what the Bible warns against about the
dexterous ability of the Satan to quote the Bible copiously in
justification of its evil deeds.
These so called Pentecostals are enemies of our Nation. They are against
our culture and traditions. They are against our values of accommodation,
compassion, tolerance and sensible civility in Yoruba land in particular.
They preach to destroy the essence of our Yorubaness by attacking
important elements of our culture and tradition.
In addition they enslave the minds of our people fostering odious
docility, engendering political passivity, ineptitude and ineptness;
inebriating our people with dangerous and debilitating indifference to
moral, social, economic and political degeneration in the larger milieu.
They encourage a genre of individualism than the vampire crude Capitalism
could ever dream of and repeatedly axe our communality.
They are active antagonists if not committed, persevering enemies of our
Yoruba heritage. They promote parlous life ideas that are of no value to
their “sheep”. Everything Yoruba nay African is denigrated and demonised
with unrestrained and often placed enthusiasm. They glamourised fake
living as they encourage their “sheep” to mimic fake and banal tenets of
Westernism. From figurative “sheep”, they turned their followers to real
“sheep” of the worst form, cultureless, directionless with amoebic and
formless identity bereft of any uniqueness.
They are mostly, intellectually incapacitated in their understanding of
our essence, uniqueness and richness as a race with chequered past and
great future. They demonize what they do not understand. They debauched in
enthused ignorance. They are intellectually lazy and never bothered to
study our ways of life, our faiths, our cultural practices before they
condemn and demonize. They relish in fake righteousness and severely
questionable superior moral authority.
These Pentecostals’ genre of exploitation is subtle but seething in its
lethality. Like a sneaky but dangerous serpent, its victims are never
prepared for the suddenness of its poisonous prowl. Before they realised
that they have been dispossessed of their hard earned money, more often
than not, it was too late. But the victims are quick to self-console,
rationalizing their misfortunes that they did it for God. Yet God spends
no money and the Bible insists that salvation is free.
Yes, it is true that you could find it in the Bible that “money is the
wheel of evangelism”, but the Bible did not say as these Pentecostals do,
that you should coarse, intimidate, blackmail, curse, threaten, cajole,
dupe, trick, deceive and burden the poor, hungry, vulnerable “sheep” to
get the money. All the evangelists in the Bible had jobs and never
received tithes to help themselves, their families and their evangelism.
The Pentecostals’ preachment of prosperity places the plan to prune the
painful plight of their tithe paying “sheep” on permanent pause. Hence,
they did not think of founding schools and hospitals like the Orthodox
Churches. And occasionally, when they are staggered from the slumber of
their gruelling greed to found Schools, they reach further down into the
discrepit dungeon of luciferous love of lucre, asking for fees out of this
world beyond the reach of their long suffering members. Ooooh, my
apologies, I meant their long suffering “sheep.”
Then their sentries would saunter unto the public fora rationalizing the
repugnant ruse, ranting relentlessly, “good education is expensive,”
“quality education costs money.” Yet all these General Overseers,
Oludasiles/Founders of these new wave Churches in the garb of Pentecostals
were beneficiaries of the benevolence of others in their youth to get
education. They’re actively removing from others, the ladder of
opportunity with which they climbed.
Pentecostals, confident cowards who could and would never see any evil in
tyranny. They are so gutless they could not even stand for themselves or
any of their own. Their pastors are murdered like strayed goats and they
could not wimp. Their members are executed during services on Sundays and
they remain deafeningly silent. Probity, integrity, social justice, equity
and equality of all is not their forte. They couldn’t stand for anything
but fall and crumble for anything like a house of cards.
These Pentecostals, all they care about is money, money, money and money.
Even those miserable “sheep” euphemised as “members” or “followers” could
never count on them at anytime for anything. They are potent enemies
within our society. They are poisonous to our social milieu. They are
parasitic conscienceless leeches on our economy. They are enablers of
politics of charlatanism. They are shining purveyors of religious
shenanigans. They are enemies within.
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been
granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do
not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.
-John F. Kennedy
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